


The Serpent Ate Eve

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 05:57:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2721311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter the universe, one thing that's vital to Missy is taking control of her own fate.</p><p>A continuing series of thematically-themed prompt fics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pirates

**Author's Note:**

> Adam ate the apple.  
> Eve ate Adam.  
> The serpent ate Eve.  
> This is the dark intestine.  
> \--Ted Hughes, "Theology"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 29 November 2014

The war—how this all began—seems long ago now, like an old salt’s yarn of another lifetime: he had wanted to be an explorer, and they had wanted a Lord Nelson, and so he had become a privateer, sailed away without her with the wind abaft the beam and betrayal glib on his thieving tongue, running away from her fast before the tide when they had been meant to run together. Well, he had a war to win and a buccaneer’s soul to fight it with, but so did she, and when he came home with a hold full of powder meant to annihilate his own port, his home berth, she had already gone, taken death as a mate and the sword as her sampler, flying the Jolly Roger against his hypocrite’s letter of marque’s colours.

When they find each other again, the war is over, and they’ve both changed, weathered supple and lean with the sea spray and the siren song of the wind in the rigging; and with their ships too many years from dock now grappling in a foreign harbour, they don’t know whether they’ll blow each other from the water, broadside against broadside, or give chase by book and stars, across the endless waves, forever (all of time and all of space from the decks of their wooden universes), or if they’ll finally cross the gulf that’s grown between them, run aloft and span the spars and tangle their sheets together, and from that height hurl their hearts into the drink, and drown as they fall, a pirate queen and her pirate king.


	2. Medieval

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2 December 2014

When he finds her, they’ve got her tied to the stake, condemned as a witch or a blasphemer for daring to be a woman, for refusing to bend her knee, for daring to raise an army and pursue power of her own, this daughter of a fallen House, this heiress to a vanished world, the Cheetah of Oakdown, Lady of Prydon, last of a proud dynasty, now fallen as cruelly as his own… _his_ lady once, but that was a very long time ago, in another life, before he took a new title and became a knight-errant and a man without a home, all to save his own soul. He walks a foreign land now, breathes a foreign air and speaks its foreign tongue, lives by its creed and protects it with all the anger of his nameless exile, and it is his honour and his salvation, but when he peers into her face and she opens her eyes and she looks at him with all her knowledge and their history—not just theirs, but that of all their people—he aches for the things that never could have been, and mourns the mistakes it was written they would make.

When they come to burn her, their sun searing in the suddenly cloudless dawn, he doesn’t know how to save her, knows only that his troth is to another’s standard, that she though no more witch than he is far from bloodless, and that the obeisance she had ceded, in the syllables and silences of their childhood, when he had kissed her and stayed with her through the night and wouldn’t let her go, was that at last, like a curse or a devil’s gift, she should let _him_ choose.


	3. Multitasking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2 December 2014

She’s forever on that device of hers. It’s obvious it’s meant to emulate a mobile phone, symbolising…her connectedness to the people he’s chosen as his adopted friends? How easily the Master has always plugged in to the network, while he travels forever on the fringes of it, observing and loving and not really knowing how to blend in with them? She’s missing the point, but that, also, isn’t new.

The Doctor doesn’t have much time to watch her use it, between all the killing and the posturing and the falling out of planes, but it seems to him it’s not just a multi-function device, like the sonic screwdriver. It’s like she’s multitasking with it, always using more than one function at a time. Monitoring her cyber army. Accessing news reports about herself. Killing, yes, but there’s a sort of sleight of hand. Taking selfies. Documenting. _Saving_.

Later, when he’s had a chance to forgive himself for forgiving her, even just a little, he oh so casually breaks in to UNIT, wanders oh so casually to the archive he’s not meant to remember, plugs himself in (oh so casually) to that little piece of what feels like home. He looks around. It’s a city, skyscrapers pointing inwards rather than out. Dark. Nobody in. Except—there are lights on, almost lost in the vast space, tiny flickers like televisions through living room windows.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are…" It’s the closest he’ll get to a sing-song voice in this regeneration. She’d like that, the coaxing, a new game. "Missy? Come on. Come out. I’m here, so are you going to come and play or not?"

His voice, at once commanding and querulous, falls on the towers like they’re toys made of those little plastic bricks. “Missy!”


	4. Fairytale

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 4 December 2014

Once upon a time— _Although can you really say ‘once upon a time’ when you’ve lived so long and long ago was your own past?_ —in a far-off place— _Well, that’s relative, look I’ve got a spaceship, and actually it travels through time too…_

_Stop interrupting, dear, or you’ll never hear the story!_

_Fine._

Once upon a time, there was an idiot.

He wanted to see the universe, just a will o’ the wisp on a streak of blue, laughing his way from spring through summer-winter-autumn, adventuring, exploring, bursting from the pages because sitting still for ‘it has been written’ had never been written in his soul. 

What was there to do but to follow? Hearts will pulse to the rhythm they have chose. And besides, the story as it stood wasn’t exactly doing either of them any favours, with its dim palette and restricted typecase. And _he_ was the brightest thing in the sky, this mercurial sprite, this colourful caprice. And laughter, oh all that laughter was good; on that they could easily agree.

Except the more they laughed the more the shadows bent to listen. The harder they beat against the web the more tightly it contracted. The story might also go like this:

Once upon a time, there was death. Once upon a time, there was a child who didn’t want to die because it meant giving in and being left behind. But it’s hard to escape the things they’ve always said about you, and so, sick at heart of dying and starting over and dying again, of playing out the fairytale and its inescapable, familiar plot, that boy changed himself into a girl. 

Maybe destiny wouldn’t know her then. Maybe there were words beyond the composing stick, pages between the signatures. Maybe the end could start with happily… 

Anyway disguise, deception came easily to her.

What kind of gifts are these? You’ll always survive (but you’ll suffer in the living). And you’ll always be strong (so your chains can be made heavier). And you will always, every time you open your eyes on the very first page, go seeking and find him (and need him though you shouldn’t have to; and love him, in your wounded way; and you will never have him because he doesn’t want to be owned, any more than you do). These are the things they gave her, the things she couldn’t hide, or change.

She carried them with her when she ran, and if they weighted her like stones in pockets, still she kept on looking for him. If they slowed her like stones on shackles, she would catch him up eventually, dragging them on wrists rubbed raw. 

If he thought she couldn’t feel the thrown stones, or treasure the universe as he did, with its light and its shadow, its spirit and its surprises, its equations and its chances, its time unspooling like ribbons on the fingertips of the smallest, least small of every day decisions, she lived with that sadness. She lived, by necessity, within the confines of her character inscribed in his. 

And he? Not that different, was he?, desperate for an escape he wasn’t sure existed. Running from her, running from himself, running from the tale repeatedly told, by young and by old, by human and by Time Lord.

Maybe that _was_ the universe; maybe this was once upon a time, and _c’era una volta_ ; _snipp snapp snut_ , and the end of the world; and everything in between. Maybe…

_I don’t like this story._

_Well, that’s just too bad, I don’t like it either! Do you really think they care? Because I certainly don’t. You still have to listen, that’s how storytime works._

_Shut up; I want to know what happens next._

_You started it._

_Did not._

_Eh? Yes, yes you did._

Once upon a time—

_No, I didn’t, that’s a stupid idea. I’m very good at paying attention. You can ask Clara._

_Now, you’re just making jokes. Not very funny ones, I’ll have you know. Mine are better: Why did the schoolteacher cross the road?_

_Don’t you dare—_

_I’ll do what I like, I already have. What are you going to do to stop me?_

_If I were you, I wouldn’t test me!_

_Who would want to be_ you _?_

_Ha! You do, clearly. You always have._

_Have not._

_Have too!_

_Have not!_

_Too!_

Once upon a time, there were two idiots. And they could damn well write their own fairytale.


	5. a headcanon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 7 December 2014

After a blow-up or one of them has a meltdown, all that uneasy energy pent up and torn out and dissipating, the Doctor will brush Missy’s hair. She sits in front of his reading chair on the plush pile of a patterned silk carpet. He uses a wide, soft brush with a carved walnut handle, and as he removes pin after pin, he drops them over her shoulder into her lap, where she gathers them up in her skirt and idly builds structures out of them, constructing designs and modeling geometries, balanced on the palm of her hand. Her hair is surprisingly long and prone to tangling. It’s curlicues around the edges and contrary curving curls towards the centre, like waves washing over unseen geographies below the surface. She’s sensitive to pulling, and it’s impossible not to hurt her a little, but the Doctor is patient and careful (because he isn’t or can’t always be patient and careful at other times), so Missy only sometimes makes pained faces into the space in front of them. And sometimes he’ll set the brush aside on the book he’s been reading, use his fingers to work through the most willful snarls, and his hands shake, but they’re kind, and he hesitates, but he’s gentle, and she leans her shoulder against his leg and closes her eyes and she lets him.

**Author's Note:**

> Have an AU or a prompt for this series? Leave one for me at zabbers.tumblr.com


End file.
